Leonard Bernstein is getting the a biopic treatment from A Star is Born actor-director Bradley Cooper in the movie Maestro. Dame Kiri Te Kanawa shares her memories of the great American composer – and his annoying habit.
On the cover of the album Leonard Bernstein conducts West Side Story, José Carreras clutches Kiri Te Kanawa’s big hair to his small chin. They are gazing into the middle distance from behind a chain link fence before a graffitied wall. It screams New York, 1985. It also mumbles something else, that the Spanish tenor was a foot taller back then than he’s ever been.
“You know how it works. I don’t have to explain it to you,” laughs the loftier Te Kanawa when the curious height discrepancy is pointed out. “But it looks good. It’s like Diana and Charles.”
The pair were representing West Side Story’s star-crossed lovers Tony and Maria – the parts they sang on the album, the first time Bernstein conducted the music he wrote for the 1957 show which became the classic 1961 movie musical and the remake by Steven Spielberg.
Over the years, there have been stage and screen cast recordings of the work. But the 1985 album remains the definitive – the one how its composer, who conducted the recording sessions throughout, wanted it to sound when it was just that glorious music and remarkable run of songs with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
The 1984 sessions were filmed by the BBC for a documentary. The film, which is available on Youtube, captures Bernstein as the cigarette-fuelled demanding taskmaster, conducting as much with his eyebrows as his baton. It also captures Te Kanawa as the unflappable one-take professional, one who had loved West Side Story since first seeing the movie as a teenager in New Zealand.
It captures Carreras having an occasionally tough time with Bernstein who doesn’t necessarily want the usual tenor top-note flourishes from the singer. Elsewhere, he’s meant to be singing the role of the white American Tony but his Spanish-sung pronunciation of “Maria” proved problematic. Which is perhaps understandable – it’s also his second name.
Te Kanawa knew at least one of the songs backwards – the first track on her 1966 self-titled debut NZ album was the jauntiest number in the show, I Feel Pretty.
“That was the music that I loved, that I grew up on,” she says in the documentary. “This young boy, young girl, love and all that sort of thing and parents not allowing it. I think I was going through the same sort of torments myself when I was very young… I was in love with a young man who played the piano and could play this music like heaven, I thought, and I would sing it along with him and we’d just go around singing it all over the place.”
“There are better songs in the show,” Te Kanawa says now of I Feel Pretty, which on the album got a less jaunty touch than it has in either movie. “But people can do all sorts of things with that song.”
Yes, well, rock’n’roll star Little Richard did famously record a version on an Aids benefit record in 1992.
“Yes, well. That one,” she laughs.
The time of the recording came when Te Kanawa’s profile was at its highest – three years earlier she had sung at the wedding of Charles and Diana. In the year before West Side Story was released, she featured on five albums. All of which, she thinks, led to the call to come to New York and record the album of the quintessential Big Apple musical.
“I was up there, as you do, you have your moment in the sun,” she tells the Listener.
At the time Bernstein told Gramophone magazine: “Kiri singing the part of Maria is a dream. Maria is a Puerto Rican girl and there’s a dark colour in Kiri’s voice, coming from the Māori blood, I suppose, that is deeply moving and just right for this part. And yet when she has to sound girlish and lyrical in the high registers, it’s exactly what I want.”
It might have been a stage musical, but it was still a challenge. Bernstein didn’t create Maria’s songs to be sung by an operatic soprano or Tony’s for a tenor.
“It was not easy singing for us. It was right in the wrong slot for all of us. It was quite a heavy thing. It was just our voices are trained in another way and just didn’t quite suit where it was sitting. But we all got through it.”
Before the recording sessions, Bernstein rehearsed the singers at his apartment in the Dakota building. Despite being such a towering figure in American music – one who is getting his own biopic starring and directed by Bradley Cooper – Te Kanawa didn’t find him intimidating.
“He was a great man… highly intelligent. Everything about him was enviable …it was nice to sit and listen to him. He was a very sensitive human being, also very strong. He had his own opinion about things. I cherished the privilege to be in his company and he was very, very kind to me.”
But she did find one thing she disliked.
“He smoked all the way through the rehearsals which just about did me in and I finally had to say you have got to stop smoking. I can’t breathe any more, and I got a sort of bit of a throat infection. So, I was not happy with having to contend with him smoking … everyone knows I hate smoking.”
The film of the time shows, at Bernstein’s request, Te Kanawa singing a stirring Somewhere, which is not one of Maria’s songs. Her version wasn’t included on the final album, she says, due to her throat problems. But it’s a moment that shows how the great American stage musical reached the lofty heights of opera. Does she see West Side Story as being up there?
“Yes, I do. It was a stunning piece. Very operatic for all of us. Really difficult to sing. Musical theatre people – I don’t know how they get through it but now of course they’re miked, which is fine – but we had to, as real singers, sorry, classical singers, it was slightly difficult for us.
“That recording was, I think, fairly amazing. It’s a line in the sand really, isn’t it?
Maestro is in cinemas from December 6 and on Netflix from December 20. Leonard Bernstein conducts West Side Story is available via streaming platforms, CD and vinyl.
This interview was originally conducted at the time of the release of Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story and published in the Listener January 8, 2022.
